A trip to the home of artist Tony Gutierrez is one you are not likely to forget. Tucked in a tiny neighborhood off Sixth Avenue on Vero’s mainland, his unassuming apartment complex looks like the last place you’d expect to find a contemporary artist’s studio.
Behind the front door is a narrow hallway that opens into an unexpectedly spacious main room. The eye is immediately pulled to a huge black-and-white abstract that dominates the studio. Boldly claiming wall space next to it are two shield-shaped paintings; across from them, a painting that spans five canvases of differing sizes commands its own visual territory.
Near the center of the room stands an easel with a work in progress. Composed of acrylic pigment, expanding polyurethane foam, and sand on canvas, the 3-D painting is unique among its fellows. At its center is a mysterious symbol surrounded by linear patterning and planet-like objects. It looks like an old-fashioned TV test pattern from an alternate universe.
Scattered here and there around the room are musical instruments; a guitar is casually propped on a chair, a set of bongos rests on the floor nearby. Hanging from pegs on the wall are two notched quena flutes and an Andean pan pipe, souvenirs of Gutierrez’s native Chile. He plays all of the instruments well and sometimes appears in a local band with his friend and fellow artist Greg Ingerson.
It was Ingerson who suggested that Gutierrez try painting with expanding foam. The stuff comes in spray cans and is a quickie gap-filler for do-it-yourself home repairs. Like Gutierrez, Ingerson is fond of geometric abstraction, although the latter has lately been embellishing his foam paintings with tens of thousands of straight pins.
One of Gutierrez’s recently completed works uses nothing more than black acrylic paint on white-primed canvas. At 7 feet high and 9 feet wide, it is easily the largest painting in the room.
“I’ve done some maybe a little bit bigger,” he says.
Making a sweeping motion with his arm, he demonstrates the gestural quality of his painting style.
“I really like to paint them this big. I think you can express very well in this size.”
The painting has been divided into a composition of rectangles, some of which are slightly off-kilter; a wash of black paint around the rectangles’ edges makes their overlapping shapes appear to hover slightly above the picture plane. Circles and arcs that appear within the rectangles’ confines are shaded to appear like the holes in Swiss cheese. Within the holes, organic forms – part flower petal, part human anatomy – gently swell.
The look of the piece brings to mind the later abstract work of Fernand Léger, a French painter who developed his own brand of cubism back in 1909. Gutierrez won’t say if Léger is a possible influence, but he does remember seeing his paintings.
“I remember my aunt used to get these magazines, and I used to see those paintings all the time,” he says.
He does admit to being an autodidact, and a stubborn one at that.
“Since I was a kid I used to paint and do all kinds of stuff with my hands,” he says. “I went to art school once, maybe for one week, but I just wanted to do my own thing.”
Gutierrez, 36, was born and raised in Santiago. Both his father and grandfather were electrical contractors who did work for Chile’s telephone companies. Their house was within easy walking distance of Chile’s National Museum of Fine Art, and he visited often.
“I was always going in and out, in and out,” he says.
The museum is especially rich in Spanish paintings of the 17th through early 20th centuries. At the time he was into the Old Masters, attracted, he says, to the colors and shapes. When he discovered the work of Picasso, he was drawn to it for the same reason.
As with Léger, Gutierrez skirts the question of whether he gained inspiration from Picasso.
“It’s kind of weird,” he says. “I can draw a line, and from that line I just draw one after another one. Then something more comes out of my head, and I just do it right there.”
Gutierrez does not make preliminary sketches for his compositions. He says the picture flows naturally from his brain to his hand and onto the painting support.
A drafting T-square leans against a wall in his studio, but it is hard to tell when it comes into play. Instead of sterile perfection, his geometric abstractions have a rhythmic signature all their own.
The symbols he calls “runes” in some of his paintings look as if they could come from street art or tagging. While he hasn’t done graffiti, he did work on some 20 street murals around Santiago.
When he left Chile at 21 and came to the U.S., his first destination was the West Coast – for the surfing. He soon realized, however, that California is a very expensive place to live, especially in tourist spots like Laguna Beach. His next stop, Chicago, was too cold.
His subsequent visit to Florida led him to Vero Beach. He has lived here now for 14 years, and has his own residential irrigation business.
“It’s a good business to be in,” he says. “It gives me time to paint and do other things. You need time for yourself.”
This summer, he intends to paint “five or six big pictures” that he’ll use to try to find a gallery in the fall. He says one or two galleries in Miami have already offered him a contract, but he doesn’t want to commit to an exclusivity just get.
Another goal is to do a collaborative painting with Ingerson.
“We want to work on one of those,” he says, pointing to a half-dozen 5-by-8-foot stretchers. “I’m going to do something, whatever I want to do. After that, Greg’s going to go over and do his thing.
“We’re going to call that painting ‘Fusion,’” he adds. “I can’t wait to see it.”
